I was 26, but then turned 27 only 2 days later (I purposely planned my defense BEFORE my birthday so I could celebrate my birthday for the first time in 4 years ). I took a year off between college and grad school though, to figure out exactly what it was I wanted to do before committing. I still finished a bit more quickly than most because I was able to hit the ground running with a project (when your research project needs to be done between 2 and 8 AM, it really doesn't interfere at all with your class schedule, so you can fit more into a day ).

what does it matter if there are smarter people out there? why should we resent them? this is a sign of insecurity. work on it.

GE once did a long term study of their engineers and scientists. IIRC it covered about fifty years of research and engineering projects. It was found that the most successful employees were, on the average, B students.

I had a D average for 2 years in undergrad, flunked out, and took 12 years to complete grad school. so what? i enjoy what i do. i cant help it if i am not very smart. what matters is what i do with what i've got to work with.

As I have calculated, I would have completed my phD right at the age of 28, is it too LATE?

I completed mine when I was 29/30 (I submitted it when I was 29, but it took 6 months to find a date on which all members of the jury could unite, so I turned 30 in the mean time, and got a job). However, I completed two masters (physics and electromechanical engineering) before, so that put me in the "rather old age" class.

Never, for me. As mentioned repeatedly in the past, I never finished high-school. I quite irritates me, in fact, that a good friend of mine who is a petroleum engineering professor is trying to talk me into going back to school to get a degree. Daft bastard. I'm 50 bloody years old (about 6-8 younger than him). I have a good job, of which I actually work maybe 1 or 2 hours on an 8-hour shift, and up to 3 on a 10-hour one. The rest is whatever I care to do, which is PF, 'How Stuff Works', various Googling, and more damned games than a normal human can handle. Yeah, damn it, I'd love to be an engineer. But... I never realized that until I started hanging out in PF. Before that, my love was astrophysics. It took my interactions here to point out to me that most of what I've done in my life, on my own time, was engineering. Just a very ignorant approach to it.

If everything goes a planned, I'll have mine when I'm 28-29, which I think is quite ordinary here. Usually you can go to University when you're 19 (20 if you're doing military service, like I did). Then the master takes 4-5 years, after which the PhD takes another 4-5 years.

I've always wondered how most people afford to get phd's? What do they do for income while studying for a phd? In addition, you're in school until near 30, so this would seem to delay your career and family life significantly. Seems like a real commitment.

Rather than post a auto-biography here, the short story is while I was on forced "sabbatical" from college, I got my first programming job, so never returned. I had all my basic stuff done, english, history, government, first year physics, calculus, differential equations, and linear algerbra, so I just needed computer programming classes to get a degree. I ended up getting a BS degree through Regents College, AKA University of the State of New York, which is run by the regents that accredit other colleges and universities, mostly through tests like the GRE graduate subject test for Computer Science.